Anthropic documented how a Turkish company offered election manipulation as a service built on Claude. The company says it gained no meaningful traction, but the method is the point.
In its report “Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI: September 2026,” Anthropic describes an operation aimed at Malaysia that it uncovered after spotting an account using Claude to influence elections. According to coverage from Malaysiakini, The Star, and NST, an Istanbul-based company, BBS Bilisim Teknolojileri, sold access to the platform as an “influence-as-a-service” capability, pitching it as an AI-powered, “military-grade” ecosystem for political operations.
Anthropic said it removed the account and saw no sign that the operation gained meaningful traction. It also noted that the actor negotiated “sanitized wordings” when Claude refused certain tasks: in other words, rephrasing a request was sometimes enough to make progress.
The regulator MCMC denied any involvement and said it would seek clarification from the relevant parties. On September 15, MCA president Wee Ka Siong called for an investigation into where the voter records used had come from: “Where did this data come from? Who sold it?” According to Malaysiakini, the Turkish company rejected the accusations. The reports don't make clear where the voter data originated.
Carlos Montiel is an enterprise AI solutions architect. He implements LLMs, Agents, RAG, and orchestrators for companies across Guatemala and Latin America. Reach out for a consultation.
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